Prisons
have always served the role of social control (Kurshan 1996).Nobody has more acutely experience and
theorized imprisonment as such as political prisoners.This category includes people convicted
due to their resistance to state policies and politics and those who become politicized
while facing detention and/or long prison sentences and thus face further
reprisals by the prison authorities.For instance, if a convict’s utterance of the word “slave” is overheard
by guards, she’ll get time in the “hole”—thirty days of solitary
confinement.However, the US
government insists that it confines nobody for political conviction and that
all so-called political prisoners (of which Amnesty International has noted
some 150 persons) are duly convicted of a (terrorist) crime.Yet, the US government’s claim is
hardly credible, in particular in light of the existence of CIA run prisons
which defy even US Supreme Court rulings, notably Abu Ghraib in Iraq and
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.Rendered
invisible, though, especially in light of the US personnel’s torture against
Iraqi detainees, have been Iraqi women who have also been sexually abused,
raped, humiliated and even disappeared, as the human rights groups
International Women Count Network, Black Women’s Rape Action Project, and Women
against Rape have charged (Groves 2004).Photographs of their tortured bodies have appeared on the internet, yet
few reports have made light of the women’s predicament, as if to take for
granted that in a time of war women’s right to dignity, fair trial and humane
treatment are rendered null and void.Women and feminist prisoners rights activists the world over report that
women’s imprisonment is always an afterthought.This is why it is important to look at women’s
autobiographies, to study prison conditions and resistance to repression from
their accounts.

In
this paper I’ll focus on the revolutionary spirit and commitment of Angela
Davis and Assata Shakur—two iconic Black women and imprisoned
intellectuals, who were hounded by the state (US) in the 1970s and beyond.I wish to highlight their views on slavery,
on freedom, and abolitionism.How
is it that both these women, passionate in their pursuit for social justice for
oppressed peoples became political outlaws?

Bio of Angela Yvonne Davis:
Born 1944, in Birmingham, AL.She
studied French at Brandeis University (BA) and philosophy in Frankfurt, West
Germany, coming back to the US to study with Herbert Marcuse at UC San Diego;she earned a master's degree from the University of
California, San Diego, returning to Germany for her Ph.D. in Philosophy from
the Humboldt University of Berlin, GDR.Davis taught philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles,
during the late 1960s,
during which time she also was a member of the Communist Party USA and associated with the Black Panther Party.The University of California fired her from
her job in 1969
because of her membership in the Communist Party.She was later rehired after community uproar over the
decision.Davis ran for Vice
President on the Communist ticket in 1980 and 1984 along with Gus Hall.In 1970 Davis became the
third woman to appear on the FBI's Most Wanted List when she was charged with
conspiracy,
kidnapping,
and homicide,
due to her alleged participation in a prisoners’ escape attempt from Marin County Hall of Justice.She evaded the police for two months
before being captured, tried, and acquitted of all charges eighteen months
later.Allegedly, Johnathan Jackson,
younger brother of prison inmate and cause célèbre, George Jackson, had stolen
the guns from Angela's home to use in the escape attempt.While being held in the Women's
Detention Center in New York City, Davis got on well with other inmates and
with the help of her outside supporters was able to mobilize the prisoners, in
particular, helping to initiate a bail program for indigent prisoners.Initially, she was segregated from the general population in
deplorable conditions, but with the help of her excellent legal team was able
in short order obtain a Federal court order squashing that practice.The excuse was that prisoners might be
hostile to her, but, in fact, most of the other prisoners were friendly and
supportive.In 1972, she was
exonerated on all charges.In 1972John Lennon
and Yoko Ono
released the song "Angela" about her and Rolling
Stones released "Sweet Black Angel" which chronicled her
legal problems and agitated for her release.When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he vowed that
Angela Davis as avowed communist would never hold a teaching position in the
Cal state system.However, in
1991, she was appointed a professor in the History of Consciousness Program at
UC Santa Cruz and became presidential chair of African and Feminist Studies in
1994.Prof. Davis is active in the
prison abolitionist movement and has recently written about the conditions of
women prisoners.

Bio on Assata: Born in 1947
in NewYork, Assata Shakur became an activist while attending Manhattan
Community College in the mid-1960s and after graduation, she joined the Black
Panther Party and then the Black Liberation Army, an underground military
formation.Being targeted by the
FBI’s COINTELPRO, she was apprehended in a shootout on the New Jersey turnpike
in 1973, where she was seriously injured.Despite medical evidence that she could not have fired a shot given her
wounds from police fire, Shakur was convicted by an all white jury in a trial
marked by gross legal violations (kangaroo court).She was acquitted of bank robbery charges stemming from
other trials. During much of her pre-trial phase, she was held in men’s maximum
security prisons. She spent two of the six years in prison in solitary
confinement.Shakur was broken out
of prison in 1979 and now lives in exile in Cuba where she received political
asylum in 1984.

Joy
James (2005) discusses the rich tradition of slave narratives, i.e.
autobiographies written by former slaves, who cherish their newly found freedom
(from chains).Prisoners liken
their lot to slavery (to a slaveship that doesn’t move) and since 1865, a new
genre of neo-slave narrative was born—ranging from conservative and
liberal to radical and revolutionary (xxii).On the one hand, these narratives demand emancipation (parole, clemency) and on the other hand, they cry
out for freedom—from a
repressive, racist, sexist and capitalist system; the latter could be deemed
radical, and it is in the autobiographies of Angela Davis and Assata Shakur
that we find expressions of radical neo-slave narrations.In fact, to this day Shakur (born
Joanne Chesimard) considers herself a run-away slave who is marooned in
Cuba.That the state hasn’t
forgotten this fugitive slave was recently made clear in former governor of New
Jersey’s call for a bounty on her head, dead or alive.But Cuba has not complied in
extraditing her.On May 2, 2005, her name was added
to the FBI's Domestic Terrorist List with a $1 million reward for assistance in
her capture.

In
both Shakur’s and Davis’ autobiographies the specter of legal proceduralism
is discussed which distinguishes their accounts from other neoslave
narratives.Davis knows from her
own experience with Jim Crow and from her historical understanding of the
racial underpinnings of American jurisprudence, that a naïve faith in the legal
system would be displaced, and therefore, political activism, e.g. by
conscientizing the people around a cause, is the most effective means to
transform the system or, at least to influence the judge through political
pressure—after all, she was granted bail because the judge’s office
couldn’t handle the flood of international mail of bail support (335).At the same time, along with her
radical lawyers, she utilized the tools of liberal proceduralism, to win her
freedom and other political prisoners.But the internal conflict accompanies her political deliberations.In her advocacy work for the imprisoned
Soledad brothers and then for her own case of imprisonment, while awaiting
trial, Davis deliberates incessantly whether it is worth to participate within the legal confines and how to mount radical political protest against “legal”
injustice.For example, with respect
to pursuing bail she deemed “the political content of the bail issue too
weak.It did not permit people to
express their resistance to the system of repression, which was not only behind my own imprisonment but was
why so many others were languishing in prison” (336, her emphasis).Celebrating an early victory of having
been granted bail, she immediately retreats to apologize in the face of many
poor prisoners who are framed by the system and have no supporters’ network to
bail them out.Nevertheless, she
concedes that she had misjudged the yearlong bail campaign, because it did
galvanize and politicize so many people who may just wanted to see that bail
was granted to her.“Once they had
been exposed to the realities of the prison and judicial systems, they were
forced to give serious consideration to the political repression we spoke
about” (1988, 336).

This
evaluation shows that Davis pursues a macroscopic perspective (of systemic
injustice) rather than an individualist viewpoint.Precisely, for this reason, political prisoners, such as
Davis or Mumia Abu-Jamal, are deemed dangerous by the prison wardens.They become a security risk and are
swiftly placed in solitary confinement far away from the general population
whom they might organize (although ironically, Davis was told that she received
solitary because other prisoners might attack her).Yet, understanding the macroscopic aspect of oppression does
not license one to a radical point of view.Abu-Jamal is a case in point.In his first book, Live from Death Row, he describes how difficult it is to shake of a
naïve faith in the system and in American jurisprudence.After his wrongful conviction, he
believed that justice would prevail.Abu-Jamal studied carefully Black history, and as a journalist, he was
aware of police brutality and of frame-ups of countless Black and poor folk,
not least of the MOVE organization in Philadelphia, whose trials he covered as
a journalist.“Even in the face of
this relentless wave of antiblack state terror, I thought my appeals
would be successful” (xvi-xvii, his
emphasis).A few years ago, his
death sentence was indeed thrown out (on a technicality), but he still faces
life imprisonment and importantly, he has not been allowed to leave death row
(for his own safety, one might opine!).No doubt, the prison officials think of him as a Black messiah and if
they let him mingle with the brothers, it might just incite another Attica
rebellion.Similarily, Davis, who
was imprisoned awaiting trial during the uprising, was in solitary confinement
for most of her imprisonment, especially after the Attica prison uprising.Assata, too, was told that solitary was
for her own protection, and when she told that to fellow prisoners at Ricker’s
Island, they laughed.Assata,
like Mumia, had some initial—and what she calls, naïve—faith in the
white court system.“[I] had not
seen enough to accept the fact that there was absolutely no justice whatsoever
for Black people in amerika” (70).

In
Eyes of the Rainbow, by Cuban film maker
Gloria Rolanda(1997), former Black Panther Partymember Assata Shakurtalks about her status as a 20th Century run-away
slave—an apt self-description given the bounty for her issued by Governor
Whitman; she recounts her jail term, at times spent in male prisons, where sharp shooters’ guns
were trained onto her cell 24 hours a day.Her case won international attention, when a petition was
sent to the United NationsCommission on Human Rightsin 1978. Shakur was broken out of prisonby Marilyn Buck, Silvia Baraldini and Susan Rosenberg[1]
in 1979.In her autobiography
Assata Shakur interweaves narratives of coming of age in the 1960s with
accounts about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike, the several court
trials she was subjected to, and the disregard for the law by the authorities
at every stage.She contextualizes
the repression, the torture, the interrogation, and the blatant illegalities on
account of being a political detainee.At the time of her arrest, she was active in the Black Liberation Army,
but it was not till her confinement that she learnt about the ideological function
of imprisonment.Confronted by a
guard who ordered her to work, Shakur disobeys, “You can’t
make me work.”The guard’s
response was “No, you’re wrong.Slavery was outlawed with the exception of prisons.Slavery is legal in prisons” (64).Shakur re-read the 13th
Amendment and realized that racismis part and parcel of the capitalist system.

That explained why jails and prisonsall over
the country are filled to the brim with Black and third world people, why so
many Black people can’t find a job on the streets … Once you’re in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don’t want to
work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. …
Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and third
world people (64-5).

Actually, it seems to me that the
guard’s reasoning wasn’t quite correct, because at the time of that
confrontation, Assata was still a detainee, not convicted of a crime.

Imprisonment radicalized her
thinking about “aberrations” in the system. In a moving exchange with another
prisoner, she shares her notion of “freedom”:

[I’d] rather be in a minimum security prisonor on the
streets than in the maximum security prison in here. The only difference
between here and the streets is that one is maximum security and the other is
minimum security. The police patrol our communities just like the guards patrol
here. I don’t have the faintest idea how it feels to be free (60).

Shakur’s autobiography, which
chronicles her journey from childhood to being marooned in Cuba, is a very
important example of a radical neo-slave narrative.There is no genuine experience of freedom in a country that
holds on to the vestiges of slavery; there is no justice in a criminal justice
system that indicts and criminalizes people for their political beliefs,
whether they belong to the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Black
Panther movement, the American Indian movement, etc.

As
Shakur learnt in prison, the carceral regime is the uncanny metaphor for
a new form of enslavement, particularly in the United States.This is made poignantly clear in
Davis’s article “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison” where she
argues that “[t]he abolition of slavery … corresponds to the authorization of
slavery as punishment (in James 1998, 97).Davis provocative statements, such as “One has a greater
chance of going to jail or prison if one is a young black man than if one is
actually a law-breaker” (James 1998, 105), may serve as a rallying-ground for
pressing on with an abolitionist movement begun with the struggle against
slavery.She notes that “prison
needs to be abolished as the dominant mode of addressing social problems that
are better solved by other institutions and other means.The call for prison abolition urges us
to imagine and strive for a very different social landscape” (215).

True
to form as an activist intellectual who is witnessing injustice, Davis
emphasizes the untold anonymous people and the progressive movement that
struggled to set her free in 1972.So instead of celebrating the heroic attempt of “a single Black woman
successfully fend[ing] off the repressive might of the state” she credits her
supporters in her updated introduction of her “autobiography”: “Certainly the
victory we won when I was acquitted of all charges can still be claimed today
[in 1988] as a milestone in the work of grassroots movements” (1988 ix).Even though writing merely about her
own life would be appropriate to do in an autobiographical act, this book of a
twenty-eight year old emphasizes grassroots achievements over the pitfalls of a
singular heroic narrative, as Davis explains in the second edition of the
book.Davis couldn’t conceive of
what countless other Black revolutionaries have done—leaving the country
while she was underground—after the shoot out in the Marin County
courthouse: “But each time I considered going abroad, the thought of being
indefinitely exiled in some other country was even more horrible than the idea
of being locked up in jail.At
least in jail I would be closer to my people, closer to the movement” (1988, 12, emphasis added).

Before
winning acquittal, she vows that her life would be spend dedicated to not just
to freeing political prisoners but to “use my life to uphold the cause of my
sisters and brothers behind walls” (328).In her essay “Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation,” which
she wrote in jail, Davis alludes to the problematic differentiation of social
and political prisoners, by suggesting that prisoners of color increasingly
consider themselves as political prisoners: “They contend that they are
political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an
oppressive politico-economic order, swiftly becoming conscious of the causes
underlying their victimization” (1971, in James 1998, p. 47).And her vow of solidarity has been
unwaivering for over 30 years; she has provided leadership for the importance
of centering a social critique on prisons/penality rather than marginalizing
it, and for organizing a critical resistance movement to stem the tide of new
prison construction by educating the youth, prisoners’ families and segments of
the left to rally to the cause of abolition.Assata Shakur, too, while facing the limitations of direct
involvement with her people due to exile, has contributed to the abolitionist
movement.It was awe inspiring
hearing her taped voice at the Riverside Church in Harlem in 2001 on occasion
of the Critical Resistance East Conference.It is important to keep Assata Shakur in our
conscience:there’s a
Chicago-based group called “Hands off Assata!” which educates prison rights
activists about the ongoing danger Shakur faces for being sought by the US
government—as a fugitive slave and newly labeled “terrorist”.

A
final note: sometimes a perception among some prison activists prevails that
women’s lot in prisons is fairly easy.Shakur’streatment by the
police was extreme, but not an exception.The history of US women’s imprisonment shows that when the “ladies” rose
up and protested the repression, they were brutalized, sent in the hole or,
worse, to behavior modification units for the criminally insane (Kushnan
1996).More recently, uppity women
are sent to the super-tech control Shawnee Unit, which was established to
“control, isolate, and neutralize women who, for varying reasons, pose either a
political, escape, or disruption threat”.It has been reserved for women political prisoners and prisoners of war
(Baraldini et al. 1996).None of
the political prisoners moved there ever had an infraction of hurting another
prisoner.Posing a political
threat is the closest the US system of criminal injustices comes to label
somebody a political prisoner.

[1]As Joy James (1999) notes few
people know about these womenrevolutionaries who are serving life sentences for their part
in breaking out Assata (89). Baraldini and Rosenberg have since been released.